Not so long ago a “nice meal” in
Portland meant a big steak and a bottle of Italian wine. More recently,
it’s meant an aggressively casual atmosphere, where that steak is ground
into a burger then served with pommes frites and hazelnut aioli. Pair
it with an IPA made by the chef’s friend, and outfit your dining room
with reclaimed barnwood and a sound system made for an Old Town club,
then watch the line form.

Our idea of a “nice
meal” is changing again. You’ll still find us swinging by someplace like
Sunshine Tavern for a beer and burger, or waiting in line for rajas con
crema tacos at Mi Mero Mole, but if we’re celebrating a birthday or a
raise, or entertaining out-of-town guests, we’re headed a different
direction.

Where? Willamette Week’s
Restaurant Guide is our answer. In these pages you’ll find our
selective collection of 100 or so Portland restaurants offering
exceptional meals. We spend months working on this guide, emptying our
bank accounts between reimbursement checks and debating the merits of
various sushi joints for hours on end.

For most readers,
many of the eateries included require some sacrifice. Sometimes, that’s a
20-minute drive to Gresham for unmatched pollos à la brasa or to Beaverton for bulgogi. Other times, it’s a
40-minute wait at Pok Pok or Screen Door. Occasionally, it’s spending a
week’s worth of grocery money on a single meal at Castagna, Le Pigeon or
DOC.

In exchange, you
should have an exceptional experience. We allot several months and
thousands upon thousands of dollars to test the waters so we can offer
you trustworthy counsel.

We hope this guide will live with you for the next year,
popping off the shelf as needed on happy Fridays and stressful Tuesdays,
and when cousins visit from Chicago. We think it’s the best guide to
Portland restaurants available anywhere—for free, no less. Hopefully,
you’ll agree. And if one of our recommendations lets you down, please
drop me a line.

Increasingly, we’ve
found that the most exceptional meals don’t come from stale old-money
haunts, proto-locavore joints, bars with good burgers, or
meat-and-potatoes steakhouses.

Like the rest of Portland, we remain allergic to
pretension. We still want the cozy service and $3 tall boys of the
comfort-food era, but we also want inventive, refined dishes we’ll still
be talking about the next afternoon—and, hey, maybe a bottle of Italian
wine. MARTIN CIZMAR, Restaurant Guide 2013 Co-editor